Kean president says resume errors were made by university staff

Daniel Hedden/For the Star-LedgerKean University President Dawood Farahi speaks during a class about how citizens can respond to threats of terrorist activity in this 2004 file photo. Farahi has admitted there were errors on his resumes, but says they were not his fault.

UNION — While the governing board at Kean University has launched an investigation about false claims on his resume, university president Dawood Farahi has acknowledged for the first time that some mistakes were made.

In a recent interview, Farahi said even though there were some errors listed on past resumes, he was not responsible. Farahi said the inaccuracies, including claims that he had been acting academic dean at Avila College in Missouri and that he published "over 50 technical articles in major publications," were made by staff members at Kean who helped prepare his resume for routine accreditation reviews at the university in 1994, 2001 and 2008.

"I did not create the data sheet," Farahi said in the interview with The Star-Ledger. "I did not see the data sheet. Had I seen it, I would’ve corrected those errors. And as you can see, the errors are multiplying over time."

The head of the Union Township school’s faculty union pointed out these and other questionable claims in Farahi’s early resumes in two letters he has sent to Kean’s board of trustees. In response, the board’s executive committee retained independent counsel, McElroy, Deutsch, Mulvaney & Carpenter, to investigate the allegations "in a thorough and comprehensive way" and report back the findings, according to a statement released last week by board chairwoman Ada Morell.

Neither a spokesman for Kean nor Farahi would identify the name of the person who made the errors on the data sheet.

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The spokesman also would not say how much money is being spent on the investigation.

The resume feud is the latest in a long list of fights between the outspoken Farahi and the faculty union, which has clashed with the president for nine years over his efforts to reform the 16,000-student public university. Farahi, who became president in 2003 and earns a base salary of $293,550 annually and will be eligible for a $200,000 bonus next year, said digging through old versions of his resume is just another attempt by union officials to discredit him.

The allegations come at a time when Kean is struggling with high-profile problems with the NCAA and its reaccreditation with the Middle States Commission on Higher Education.

Farahi said the claim about the 50 articles probably originated when a Kean employee condensed his resume and misinterpreted the list of titles, some of which were submitted but never published in academic journals. He said most are operational reviews and design system reports he prepared when he worked as a consultant.

Kean University’s spokesman said Farahi has never claimed to have published an article in a peer-reviewed journal. "If I wanted to claim that, why wouldn’t I have claimed that when I was running for president? I did not," Farahi said.

Some professors say Farahi’s explanation that he was unaware of the errors doesn’t add up because the veteran president is known as a micro manager on campus.

"He’s a hands-on guy. He even looks at the grass," said Bert Wailoo, an accounting professor and union member, who submitted an Open Public Records Act request for Farahi’s resumes. "He’s in charge of everything. Nothing gets done there unless he knows about it."

James Castiglione, the president of the Kean Federation of Teachers, said union members combing through Farahi’s past resumes found several questionable entries, including titles of technical articles the union says were never published.

"There are a number of claims that come from resumes and CVs that cannot be explained by clerical errors," Castiglione said.

The union pointed to versions of Farahi’s resume from the 1980s that list an article titled Patterns of Administrative Efficiency as "accepted for publication" by three different journals, including Administrative Science Quarterly. Farahi said just because he wrote an article was "submitted" or "accepted" for publication doesn’t mean it was published.

"Submissions are an indication of an area of interest," Farahi said. "In other words, ‘What is the expertise area that you want to develop when you are here?’ So that is a common practice."

Farahi said he couldn’t explain the discrepancy because he didn’t remember the circumstances.

"Somebody may have given me a list of a whole bunch of things to do, and I (may) have given up," Farahi said. "I don’t know. It’s 1981. It’s 31 years ago. If I said it was ‘accepted,’ then it was probably accepted. I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t."